Those Glendale employees who wrote a letter to the City Manager and copied the City Council, the Attorney General’s Office, the Arizona Republic and the Glendale Star are to be commended for calling Brenda Fischer on her ludicrous suggestion of whistle blower anonymity and for their courage in doing so. (See my previous post, “Bombshell letter…Glendale has its own anonymous”). Unfortunately, nothing will come of their letter. It is an anonymous complaint and contains no tangible proof of the allegations made. Honest employees observing an already grievous leadership situation becoming worse have attempted to do something about it. It is not enough without at least one scrap of paper, one memo or one revealing email. It will go nowhere.
We all save those papers; memos, emails, etc., something that caught our attention and we thought might be useful some day. That day has arrived. Perhaps there is a Glendale employee out there getting ready to retire or to take a job elsewhere that has that magical file of papers that puts bones on these employee allegations. After you have made a copy, give that proof to someone you trust. Ask for help to make the wrong doing public but carefully consider who might help you and who already has not.
Consider Edward Snowden not because he is villain or hero but because everyone on the planet has heard of him. He single handedly changed the culture of the National Security Agency (NSA). For better or worse? I don’t pretend to know but he is an example of the power of the individual to bring about change.
Without proof nothing will ever, ever change. The poisonous environment will remain and grow more pervasive. Many employees as well as former councilmembers and citizen volunteers remember better days when Dr. Martin Vanacour was the city manager. Since his “retirement” new regimes have created a revolving door of unhappy employees seeking work elsewhere or retiring and exiting because they refused to lie to council, to overlook wrong doing or to cave into the pressure of looking the other way and doing what they were told to do in order to survive.
I started on city council in 1992. I can remember people like Grant Anderson, Jim Devine, Paula Ilardo, Charlie McClendon and David Prescott, to name a few, over the many years. They valued and practiced integrity and honesty. Today’s victims of a culture run amok include Horatio Skeete, Sherry Schurhammer, Diane Goke and Don Bolton. The new regime under Brenda Fischer and Julie Frisoni has created a new and frightening spin on the employee exodus. There exists only one way to end the madness. Proof. If you have it, produce the means to end this… Please.
© Joyce Clark, 2014
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